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that-ari-blogger · 3 months ago

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Connection (Reaching Out)

In the wind up into a series’ final arc, episodes tend to feel janky. As if they are trying to pad out the series or are unsure whether the arc has started or not. As a rule, these tend to be below average in so far as quality goes.

The Owl House, however, exists by subverting expectations, so these episodes are some of its best. Reaching Out, for example, uses the plot limbo to tell a focused story that is by far my favourite episode of the series, as well as being one of my favourite stories ever put to screen.

This episode deals with family first and foremost, specifically through the lenses of grief and legacy. It’s about memory and tradition, as well as connection and love.

Let me explain.

SPOILERS AHEAD (The Owl House)

The Owl House has a very specific style of story that it likes to tell.

This is different from genre, and part of why I dislike that concept. It’s simultaneously more broad and more specific. The series plays around in fantasy and horror, it takes inspiration from classical epic fantasy as well as shonen anime, it’s a satire of itself.

But that’s just the breakdown of genre, The Owl House’s style of story is centred around quests and humour. Episodes give you a problem that can be tangibly fixed, and either find a solution or work towards it, Understanding Willow gives you a magical accident and a spell to fix said magical accident. It’s self-contained and questy. "Go do x." "Find y." "Bring back the golden hoop of hoopiness." Etc.

This episode does things differently, in the sense that I challenge you to find a tangible solution to the problem of grief and physical distance. Even in The Owl House, dead people stay dead, and there is no foreseeable way to get home within the next day. You can’t fix that; you just have to find a new way of doing things.

It will not have escaped your notice that the episode’s opening scene is the shortest in the series, and that is because it doesn’t need to be longer.

A cold open needs to do one thing and one thing only. It needs to establish the plot of the upcoming episode. It’s a tidy way of getting across the core conflict to come, and let the audience know what they are in for.

This is the issue I have with Batman Beyond, but it’s a minour issue and not the point, so I’ll leave that for a future post.

Reaching Out opens with an event reminder. The scene has no words in it, but it is sold entirely by the acting. The animation conveys the emotions going through Luz’s mind perfectly, and it’s unclear. Guilt, fear, sadness, its ambiguous to allow for a sense of mystery, but you do know that she doesn't feel good about whatever this may be.

Then she presses “Ignore”, and the scene ends.

That’s the entirety of the cold open, any more would feel cluttered, and yet you know exactly what kind of story you are in for. This will be an episode about Luz’s relationship with her mother and will provide detail into how Luz handles her own issues.

That jacket is a gift in this context from Eda. It may be Luz's technically, but this scene sets up Eda giving it to her to help her. Now Luz has a gift from a maternal figure, its a proxy that she will cling to over the course of the episode.

When the episode actually begins, Luz procrastinates on doing the thing she probably needs to do by making a list of everything else in the world that she would rather be doing. So, we get the defining conflict of the episode spelled out more specifically. She’s avoiding something. You could have got that from the opening, but now we get a little insight into why.

“Every year, me and Mom have this little ritual we do. It's nothing big. I just miss her. That's all.”

This episode has a slow burn to it, revealing more and more of the details of this ritual over time. It’s framed as a discovery, which works with the idea of the audience slowly discovering things about Luz.

I want to dwell a little more on the animation of this episode for a moment. I promise I’ll try to talk about other stuff as well, but this episode is just gorgeous to look at.

Luz doesn’t stop moving until the confession. She’s frantic, but in a really smooth way that I find rather interesting. In just the above shot, she flows from one thought to the next, from one action to another.

This creates a feeling of momentum that diminishes over the course of the scene. It’s dynamic, like the series as a whole, but it's slowing down to something slower paced signifies the episode’s decision to focus in on something small.

“What you need is a healthy distraction from your problems.” “I have a problem, and it could distract us all day!”

That’s a very specific word choice to happen twice in twenty seconds, it's almost as if the there’s a theme going on here, and there is. Luz is seeking that distraction from her issue.

Which brings me to the subject of said issue, the grief ritual.

According to a Psychology Today article titled “The Power of Rituals to Heal Grief”:

“Rituals are an important way for people to find meaning when they lose a loved one. Everyone is familiar with rituals. Perhaps you’ve performed them during holidays, in church, or even before ballgames. You may have performed rituals to acknowledge important life changes—graduations, retirements, and even funerals... The power of rituals lies in their symbolism. Consider the ritual of graduation. Walking across a stage and shaking someone’s hand is no big deal as an act in itself. We walk all over the place and shake people’s hands all the time. But this act takes on special meaning when it’s performed at graduation, symbolizing an important transition.”

A grief ritual is crystalised emotion, allowing you to act upon it and let the pain out in a healthy way. In Luz’s case, the picking of flowers brought about a connection between her and her mother. The two grieved together, and now their physical difference means that Luz doesn’t have anyone who understands her pain exactly to share the moment with.

Enter Amity, and I want to cover that scene last, because I believe it to be the series’ magnum opus, and it needs some more build up.

Please remember that this guy helped with the experimentation on the Basilisks. He wasn't just complicit; he was an active participant. Remember that when talking about Warden Wrath.

Amity is going through what I hesitate to call a generic The Owl House plot, but it's definitely something more in the series’ general wheelhouse. She has identified two problems, those being a rift between her and her father, and the decision that was made for her about joining the emperor’s coven; and she has decided upon a solution, win the Bonesborough Brawl.

This is achievable and presents room for hijinks. Its self-contained. But it’s also an example of how well The Owl House handles theme exploration.

Each episode of the of this series has an idea that it wants to explore, and every plot point within it delves into something about that theme. In this case, it’s connection and drifting apart. Amity is drifting away from her father, Luz can’t get to her mother, and the two of them are being driven away from each other by Luz’s increasingly desperate attempts to distract herself.

You would think that grief is a secondary theme here, but it’s not. Connection is a facet of grief as an overarching idea. That’s why this is about grief rituals rather than just the feeling of loss.

The article I mentioned earlier has a passage that goes into this concept in more detail, but from a slightly different perspective.

“For Donald, this ritual was meaningful because it shared his great love of nature with his dad. For his father, it was meaningful, because it kept a piece of his son alive and well. Eventually, Donald passed away. To this day, however, his father visits the preserve four times a year, once for every season. There, he speaks to his son, takes a few pictures, and doesn’t show them to anyone.”

It's about connection to the deceased, with the person gone by. It’s a way of communing with the only thing left of that person, their legacy.

Which reframes Alador a bit here doesn’t it. He’s set up as a mirror to Manny, and yet he’s still alive. Except, is he?

In a physical sense, yes. But the person whom Amity wants to connect with is long gone at this point. Young Alador and Old Alador are very different people, specifically in terms of agency. Young Alador acted, Old Alador reacts.

So, Amity tries her own ritual to connect with the Alador that once was. Alador gets to see this and is forced to think for a moment. Suddenly, his world has been rocked just far enough for him to start listening.

The conversation is all well and good. But for my money, the look of abject pride on Alador's face here sells the connection more than anything. This is someone who, for the first time, has looked at what his daughter is rather than what he wants her to be, and he is proud of what he sees.

“What? You don’t want to join the Emperor’s Coven anymore? But that’s always been your dream.” “No, that’s always been Mom’s dream. And you went along with it. I bet you didn’t even know I was dating Luz!” “Edalyn’s kid?” “See, you don’t talk to us anymore! You’re too busy making these monsters for the Emperor, and Mom’s been too busy trying to dye my hair green.”

Turns out, when you stop listening to your kids for a while, you miss things. Your assumptions might be wrong. Your understanding of who they are might be way off the mark.

That’s what Alador realises here, that the thing he’s been trying to connect with his daughter over was never truly there. So, he takes a different approach.

“I like your new hair colour. Its abomination coloured.” “Finaly someone gets it. Can you tell Mom that?” “I’ll talk to her.”

The hair dying has been a symbol of agency for Amity over the course of the series. It was green as she sought her mother’s approval, then that faded and she was given the choice of what to do, and she chose the pink. It’s an expression of her own wants and desires, and she wants to be like her father.

Alador’s new approach isn’t to bond with his daughter over expectations, its to take an interest in something she does, and find common ground there.

I like the act of reaching for a hug and getting subverted. The relationship has mostly collapsed, and they’re now rebuilding it almost from scratch.

“It’s a start.”

Connection, relationships, love, loss. We have some key themes, let’s get into that tree scene.

I’m not going to give you the entire scene here, watch the episode. Writing out the words doesn’t have nearly the same impact as the stellar voice acting.

Instead, I want to highlight how this episode achieves its nuance, and that is through the grief rituals that I have kept mentioning. Any story can talk about how loss makes someone feel, but this doesn’t mention that at all. Instead, it highlights how the physical separation interrupts with the process.

Luz’s grief centres around sharing that emotion with her mother, she expresses it through the practiced motion of picking flowers with someone else who can share her pain.

“I don’t know what rituals you have in the Human Realm, but, I’ll help you pick some flowers, and we can do something here!”

Amity doesn’t know what Luz is going through, but she can empathise. She can see her girlfriend is going through something and help her out. She can take the place in the ritual and allow Luz to grieve.

Love isn’t about the good times, it’s about everything. Love is about joy and heartbreak and triumph and loss. Its about sharing emotions together, lifting each other to new heights, and supporting each other in the lowest moments.

The episode doesn’t give us a fix to its issue. Luz is still separated from her mother, but it gives us a substitute, and that leans in to a theme I haven’t really mentioned yet at all in my coverage of the series, distance.

Yes, the obvious of Luz being away from home and wanting to get back has been a core part of the plot, but the series hasn’t really engaged with what that means up until now.

Sometimes distance separates people, whether it be through forced movement, or just the twists and turns of life. And sometimes that comes in the way of rituals like this. Do you bottle up the emotions until you get back? No. You find a new way of doing thing, you adapt, you change. You find the light.

Light, do not faulter.

Final Thoughts

This episode also establishes lore for how the Wild Witches work, specifically through that idea of connection again. The Wild Witches are a group of people who accept and protect each other, you don’t have to be skilled at anything to be a Wild Witch, you don’t have to meet any criteria. Which is good, because Edric is awful at potion magic. But that’s not the point, the point is that he has an interest in going outside the box, the point is the effort not the execution.

Considering how the Emperor made wild magic illegal, the Bad Girl Coven takes on a ton of queer/pride coding. They support each other because nobody else will. Anyone who slips through the cracks has a home in the Bad Girl Coven. Just like pride, where there isn't a bar at a parade that says: "you must be this gay to enter", it's about accepting everyone for who they are.

Next up is Them's The Breaks, Kid, so stick around if that interests you.

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